Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev: 2020

Welcome to the Dev section of my blog with development related articles.


Use Telegram as a notification service with Go

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev

Telegram is my favorite messenger for chatting. There are many reasons for this. But Telegram is also very suitable to use it as a notification service for your own projects. For example I get a daily overview of the number of page views of my blogs, but also notifications about new Webmentions, or likes and announcements via ActivityPub are sent to me via Telegram.

View

How I use the Speech Synthesis API on my blog

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev
Updated on

I just added the feature to my blog that allows you to have any article read to you. For some articles I already add an MP3 file with a natural sounding pronunciation, but now it is also possible to get articles read aloud that don’t have an MP3 file (if the browser and operating system support this).

View

Find broken links on your website with muffet

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev

Today I wanted to check if my blog contains some broken links and it actually did. I used the Go-based tool muffet which crawls a website and checks for HTTP errors when following links. To speed up the process, I started a local Hugo server and used the following command for muffet (after installing it):

View

Using the Google Text-to-Speech API to create audio versions for blog posts

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev

AshwΓ­αΉ… VΓ­shnΓΊ asked how I created the audio version for my latest post. Here’s a way how you can use the Google Text-to-Speech API to create MP3s from text. A simple way to try this API without a Google Cloud account is to follow these steps:

View

Pure CSS Lightbox in Hugo theme

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev

Hugo themes have the option to override the default rendering of Markdown images by using β€œMarkdown Render Hooks” since version 0.62.0. By creating a file in layouts/_default/_markup named render-image.html it is possible to use a custom template for rendered images. This gives a lot of flexibility. I just used that flexibility to create a lightbox with pure CSS (without using JavaScript, like many lightbox implementations do). After clicking (or tapping) on an content image, you will see it filling the browser view. Another click brings you back to the content.

View

Adding ActivityStreams representations to Hugo

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev
Updated on

I promised and people already asked, so here is the first part of the documentation about how I enabled ActivityPub support on my Hugo-based blog:

View

How I automatically create my blogroll

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev
Updated on

I just updated my blogroll and thought that it might be a great idea to share my workflow to do exactly that. I use Miniflux a lot. Using Miniflux, I read all the blogs and get all the news, get updates from all the YouTubers and even subscribe to some Mastodon accounts (fediverse microblogs). I use multiple categories to sort the feeds. One of those categories is β€œBlogs” with all the blogs, which I also list on my blogroll.

View

Use system fonts to make your site load faster

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev

Although it’s great to self-host your web fonts instead of using a service like Google Fonts (that may decrease the privacy of your site’s visitors, because Google can log IP addresses and other stuff), it’s probably not necessary to use web fonts at all. Every PC or tablet or phone has a lot of fonts already pre-installed, which are more than perfect for displaying your website (unless you take a lot of care about corporate design or your personal brand and require a specific font).

View

How to do PESOS from Pocket to Micropub

Published on in πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Dev
Updated on

After thinking about it, I finally figured out how to PESOS from Pocket to my own site using IFTTT. I tried to do it in a similar way to how Charlotte Allen did this.

View

Previous

Jan-Lukas Else